Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky:
“The decision of the Dutch court to transfer the Scythian gold to Ukraine is a politicized and biased verdict that has nothing to do with justice. Scythian gold was in Crimea long before the peninsula even began to have any relation to Ukraine. Thus, in September 2019, Crimean museums submitted to the court additional information on the ownership of artifacts, including acts of acceptance of finds into museum collections, as well as photographic documents confirming that the exhibits were in Crimean museums even before the transfer of the peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. However, the court did not take into account the obvious.
In fact, this is a kind of cultural raiding multiplied by Russophobia. Crimeans continue to be punished for their historic choice to reunite with Russia, and now their national cultural heritage is simply stolen from them. In the case of the transfer of the Scythian gold collection, the Amsterdam court took the side of politics, not truth. “
